Building defeatharper.ca: lessons from a first-time WordPress developer

An excellent topic for developers using WordPress for the first time. Also suitable for people building a website for the first time. This is a case study of a first-time WordPress development project for the website defeatharper.ca. My talk will outline how the ideas behind the site evolved as the requirements changed and the environment it was designed to play in kept shifting. How did we manage the change? How do you keep forward progress in development?

This was my first “real” WordPress project as a developer. I will be sharing my trials and tribulations in trying to get WordPress to “act like a proper CMS”, and then my ultimate insights into the “WordPress Way” of doing things. I have mixed feelings about the two major plugins we used, and will share those findings with you as well.

Sometimes saving time takes a lot longer.

Learning Outcomes

  • The importance of working with and consulting senior programers.
  • Planning your time.
  • When you are doing something for the first time everything is unknown (see point one).
  • How generic coding skills apply to WordPress (for better or worse!)

Speaker